A lot has been said about the iPhone’s ability to locate the user; the new 3G iPhone actually uses GPS to do this, while the original iPhone just uses triangulation from cell-phone towers to figure out where you are.

The triangulation method should work reasonably well for most purposes (i.e. ‘what town am I in?’ at the very least), but my experience lately has been that this isn’t the case.

The other day, I hit the Locate button and got this result. Click on the picture for a bigger version:

Where I was standing, the terrain is such that there’s no signal at all from the south and west. Where I was standing, the elevation is 700 feet, and the mountains are about 2300 feet. You can see the problem (if you squint) in this view looking roughly south. Click for a bigger version:

There’s also a low ridge between the airport (where I was standing) and the town of Front Royal itself. It’s not enough to really notice, but it’s enough to block cell phone signals. My guess is that the phone could get only one signal, and that this was from a cell site on or near Mouth Weather, which is just NE of the identified (wrong) location. All the system could tell was that I was somewhere on a line roughly 210 degrees from that tower.

The lesson: cell-phone triangulation location information can be ridiculously inaccurate when in areas with interesting terrain and poor coverage. More importantly and less obviously, the locator system appears to be unable to reliably determine when this is the case.

The AP has the story now; Tinotopia had it almost two years ago.

There’s a Washington Post story today about Jimmy Justice, the ‘video vigilante’ who records cops and other NYC official vehicular malparkage and posts the results online. The story also discusses the crowded genre of videos of cops beating the crap out of people. The police commissioner in New York has said that the department will be setting up a way for people to send these videos directly to them, the better to sniff out rogue cops. Sounds like a good idea.

Predictably, the police union doesn’t like this idea; the union isn’t content with protecting the rights and jobs of its law-abiding, non-slimeball members. I’m sure that this isn’t actually the case, but to my eyes it looks like a lot of big-city police unions must have a whole department dedicated to defending the right to be a sociopath with a badge.

However, the police union cautions that videos do not always give the entire picture, and officers worry about a flood of citizen videos by people who might not understand that police work is sometimes a messy business.

“The use of force sometimes looks violent,” said Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.

The use of force is violent. I mean, that’s the point. Look up ‘violence’ and ‘force’ in the dictionary. I don’t have anything against the police occasionally being violent; if miscreants only needed to be asked nicely to stop whatever they’re doing, we wouldn’t need the police at all. Anyone could ask nicely.

We have the police because a lot of people won’t stop when asked nicely, and so we need guys with guns and clubs and Tasers to use force (or at least the threat of force) to get them to stop.

“Pieces of video don’t tell the whole story.”

This leaves it a mystery, then, why the police unions fight so hard to keep always-on cameras out of police cars. Presumably they would want ‘the whole story’ on tape, no? Or maybe the cops are just being disingenuous.

With the police commissioner openly asking for citizen videos, Lynch said, “he’s going to have to be very careful not to bow to public pressure and not bow to emotion.”

Nope. Wouldn’t want an allegedly democratic government bowing to something like public pressure. If you did that, the next thing you’d know, those civilians would wind up thinking that they were in charge of the police!

It still baffles me as to why the NAACP or some similar organization hasn’t spent a couple million dollars giving out video cameras that transmit their take back to some central server (so the video isn’t lost when a rogue cop steals and destroys the camera) to people who live in the ghetto.

I haven’t had any problems since I moved to the boonies, where people are more relaxed; but I can personally testify that city and suburban cops are quite willing to fuck with law-abiding, white, middle-class guys. That experience, plus the fact that they argue so vehemently against their own video surveillance, leads me to believe that pretty much everything that poor black people say about cops’ behavior toward them is true.

Why do the good cops put up with this?